Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished ManuscriptAbstract: As a teenager, Ea Sola became a refugee of the Vietnamese-American War. She was forced to flee Saigon for Paris with her French-born mother, while her father, a Vietnamese who joined the communist front, stayed in southern Vietnam. Unfamiliar with the culture in which she suddenly found herself, and deeply angered by the prejudices and distain she experienced in France, Ea Sola says she rejected everything as a conscious act of defiance. She began her work as a dancer-choreographer with silent street protests in Paris, later danced in professional companies across Europe, and then, in the late 1980s, she returned to Vietnam to reunite with her family, remake home, and create dances that are personally meaningful, as well as aesthetically and politically compelling. The moment she set foot in Vietnam again Ea Sola says, [f]inally I discovered, the country is in the body and [t]he body doesnt forget. This paper explores the productive possibilities of critical, transnational performance through the life and works of Vietnamese-French choreographer Ea Sola. Engaging theories of transnationality; embodiment; migration, exile and diaspora; hybridity and poly-vocality, I ask: how do Ea Solas experiences as a war refugee, of exile and return, ethically inform her dance-making? In what important ways do her dances embody a transnational subjectivity and a politics of social interdependence? What of value can be learned from the ways Ea Solas work engages with diverse, differently localized audiences around the globe?

Publication Type: Paper AbstractAbstract: In 2014 Scientific American announced that EA FIFA had finally gotten “the physics right.” After two decades of players complaining about “floaty” balls, software engineers and animators for the world’s most popular and profitable sports videogame finally took a close look at the projectile physics code and discovered a lurking error in the drag coefficient, the simulation of air resistance. Fixing this error produced a ball that: “at long last, could sail smartly through the air” (Chiaet 2013). The new feature was dubbed “real ball physics.” Karen Barad argues that the entire history of physics “can be understood as a struggle to articulate what touch entails” (Barad 2012). FIFA’s tagline commands players to “feel the game.” This talk addresses the matter and meaning of touch in FIFA by sketching the history of the game’s AI and physics engines, controller technology, and animation and then locating this history in relation to the long and diverse history of bounce programs in computing—a history that begins with the Whirlwind at MIT and extends forward to spectacular simulations such as FIFA’s on the one hand and to smaller but pervasive effects like Apple’s bounce scroll on the other. Attending to the fine-tuning of the ball’s interaction both with players and with the elements of the programmed environment opens up a conversation about how the technical and cultural conditions of good and bad “game feel” demonstrate the ways different natural, social, and economic orders are continually played out through touch.